Field Recordings 2 - Sapporo Beer Garden 2008

So in serious news Prime Minister Fukuda resigned suddenly yesterday. I spoke to a few people, and from what I can tell it seems that no-one expected it, and although he was pretty unpopular, people don't like the fact that he just quit like that, it feels kinda like he... left the country in the lurch? Something like that. Some people are pretty happy though, I'm sure. It was a real shock especially since he reshuffled his cabinet last month, but Abe quit after a similarly positive move...

Anyway, y'know what doesn't bring in the hits? POLITICS. Y'know what does? BEER! At least that's what I'm banking on with this, my second field recording, taken at Sapporo's crazy drinking festival Beer Garden 2008! I'm sure I wrote about this a lot already, but Beer Garden is a huge sprawling outdoor beer drinking extravaganza across Odori Park for about a month every summer. I went down on the first night, and between getting pretty much tanked, I walked the whole length, from the German Beer Garden to the Suntory Premium Malts Garden clutching a digital recorder as I went.



It's 15 minutes long, so the 192kbps version is a pretty hefty 21 megs. Still you can download it right here, and the main Internet Archive page for it in different sizes and formats is here.

And here are the notes:

00.00 - It starts off with Japanese people singing German beer songs around West 9 or 10, the German Beer Garden. At this end things were pretty calm and restrained, people sitting around and enjoying the music and the beer.

Between here and 06.00 I was walking past the International Beer Garden (I don't remember which brands) which seems to have been deadly quiet, and the area of grass and slides where parents had left their children to fend for themselves while they went off to get trolleyed. I'm KIDDING!

06.00 - Sapporo Beer Garden. The home brand patch was packed, and looked something like this:


But it wasn't all that crazy.

08.00 - The Kirin Beer Garden on the other hand was off the hook. Hear someone dropping something! A bunch of tanked guys jumping up and down screaming "NUMBER ONE!" Crowd pleasing sing along numbers! This was actually where my friends were sitting - conversation was difficult...


11.00 Asahi Beer Garden was less crazy, but still a pretty big party. They had the big bandstand as a stage so they could easily entertain the crowd, it was packed:


13.00 - After that we hike on to the last garden, Suntory: The Premium Malts Garden. This place was pretty cool, but not exactly as "pumping" as Asahi or Kirin.

There you go, now you just need to go get drunk and spend 15 minutes listening to that on your ipod while you walk though a balmy summer evening and you might as well have been there yourself.

I'm too good to you.